Home Theatre 102: Screens and Sounds

attention first. Right, We talked a bit about L E D screens, O L E D screens, projector screens, the differences between h D t V four K and eight K, what h d R or high dynamic range is, and what refresh rates mean. But there are some other things that I want to chat about before we move on to sound. That's going to be the main focus of this episode. But we've got some stuff I got to clear up first because it does get confusing out there,

and I didn't cover absolutely everything. So for example, as I mentioned in the previous episode, a lot of the specs with television's really comes down to marketing. Okay, so technology is is fun stuff, and there are a lot of hard things we can talk about, like as in defined things, Right, there are certain technologies where you've got a certain set of specifications, and anything that meets those specifications counts in. Anything that doesn't meet those specifications doesn't count.

But with home theater, there's a lot of marketing jargon out there and a lot of different approaches to trying to create the best experience, and it gets really muddled. Companies find all sorts of different ways to quantify elements in a television and then they slap that number on a box. And these numbers can look really impressive, right if you just see the number, or like some interesting designation that's heavily trademarked, that might seem like, oh, this

is really cool, it's really advanced, it's really good. Other companies will go a step further they incorporate some proprietary technology and their televisions. That makes it even more confusing, where this is something that you will only find in TVs from this particular company, and you ask, well, what does that mean, why is it there, what benefit does it give me? And is it compatible with everything I want to watch? So one of those companies that does this,

and it's by no means the only one. I don't want to just single it out, but Samsung is one of those companies. So I talked about oh LEDs O L E D S. I did not, however, talk about q LEDs, a technology that Samsung promotes, and its television's q LEDs, according to Samsung, stands for quantum dot L E D t V. So that raises an obvious question,

what the heck is a quantum dot. Technically, a quantum dot is a nanoscale crystal that when UV light hits that crystal, the crystal will emit various colors, and the color that the crystal emits depends upon the crystal's size. And that probably sounds a little bit weird. It kind of sounds like Star Wars E right, like a chaiber crystal. Your chiber crystal determines the color of your lightsaber blade.

Almost the same sort of concept here, except we're talking about stuff on the nanoscale that, by the way, we're talking about like nanometer that means one billionth of a meter, so tiny that the quantum rules start to take effect. And all things quantum and nanoscale are a little weird because quantum mechanics do not necessarily work the same way classic physics do, at least not the way we understand

it right. There's stuff it happens at the nano scale that just does not happen at the macro scale, and it seems almost magical to us because it's not the experience we have. Maybe if you can actually see the matrix, it all makes sense, like everything fits together. But right now we still have incredibly intelligent physicists who are trying to find ways of marrying the world of quantum mechanics

with our understanding of classical physics. Anyway, let's say you've got a quantum dot that's six nanometers across, and you hit that quantum dot with light that's around four fifty nanometers in wavelength. That actually puts it in the neighborhood of blue light. Blue is in that that frequency range um that crystal or that wavelength range. I should say that crystal then will emit red light. That's six nanometer

wide crystal. But if you were to build a quantum dot that's five nanometers wide and you that one with that same blue light, that crystal would emit orange light, and so on. So by just changing the size of the quantum dot, or making quantum dots of different sizes, you can create different light effects even using the same light source hitting all those different quantum dots. Quantum dots

have lots of other potential applications besides television screens. Uh. The dots properties also depend on tons of different factors in addition to size, such as the shape of the crystal and whether or not the crystal is hollow or if it's solid, And there's some really cool biomedical applications, and beyond that, there's talk of quantum dots taking apart in self assembling nanocrystals as a nanotechnology that can build

itself under the right conditions. But that's enough for us to cover for now, because we could do an entire episode about quantum dots and nanotechnologies and totally get off track. So a Samsung q LED t V is actually a variant on the l e ED l c D Television's l c D standing for liquid crystal display. So l e ED t vs use light emitting diodes that's what LED stands for, as tiny lamps that provide the light for a television screen. So all that light is coming

from these little l e ED light sources. A liquid crystal display panel acts kind of like a shutter or shade for each of those lamps, and it allows a certain amount of light through to the screen in order to achieve the proper brightness or luminosity of a scene. And this also means that the little lamps are actually always on in the background, and some l e D screens aren't really able to show really dark colors effectively, meaning you kind of get lousy contrast ratio compared to

oh LAD screens. Oh lads or organic light emitting diodes are different, and that each pixel in an old LAD screen emits its own light, and thus it can turn off entirely and achieve a true black on screen instead of this kind of dark gray, because there's actually a light shining through a liquid crystal, and some of that light is bleeding through the liquid crystal to get to the screen. So with oh leads you don't have a backlight.

The old leads are both light and pixel and oh LAD screens are emissive, whereas l e D screens are transmissive,

and a Q LEAD screen is also transmissive. It's a type of l E D, so Samsung's Q l e D screen includes a film of quantum dots in addition to the L E D and l c D elements, So the light passes through the film of the quantum dots in addition to everything else, I imagine that probably means that the lights behind the screen need to be even brighter in order to you know, push the right amount of light through all those it's including the extra

layer of the quantum dot film. But the quantum dots are supposed to provide much more vibrant and realistic color representation, so the colors you get on screen are supposed to be more accurate and jump off the screen more effectively. Now, q laed screens typically can produce a much brighter picture than oh LAD screens do. So while oh lads are great for contrast and they work really well in dim rooms, q LED screens are more luminous and they can work

better in brighter rooms. So even if you have like a lot of ambient light in your home theater space, or you're not even building a home theater you just want, you know, a good TV and you have to have a lot of windows or whatever, or a lot of other light in the space, these screens can be bright enough where they can overcome that that ambient light that's in your area. And they also work pretty well with HDR content, that high dynamic range where you're trying to

reproduce colors in a really vibrant way. Now that is not to say that que lads are better than oh LEDs, but rather if you're in a bright setting, it can

seem that way. This, by the way, is one of the reasons that's so dang hard to shop for television's because typically you go to a store that's lit with these bright, fluorescent, you know, lights, and it can mean that a television that technically will deliver a superior performance under normal viewing circumstances might not look the best simply because you're in a very bright environment, not in a

home theater setting. That's why a lot of these places will have like a home theater room set up where at least a certain number of televisions can be shown without being in that bright environment. Then again, maybe if your home is brightly lit, then the experience you get in the store is exactly what you need, because you want to make sure that the screen you get is

one that you know you can see everything on. Something else I didn't really cover in the last episode is viewing angle, but that is actually important to Again, this gets around the technology part. It's more about how you

position the technology. Most shopping guides for television's assume that you will normally view the television pretty much dead on, sitting you know, directly across from it, so like at a zero degree angle straight line between you and the TV, and the center of the television would be positioned more

or less at your eye level. Once you start moving that around, like changing the viewing angle, you start to encounter some issues, Like you would get the ideal experience under those circumstances, and once you deviate from those circumstances, you might encounter problems. For example, TVs that have l c D screens can have areas that appear brighter or darker from other viewing angles. So if you're sitting to the side or you wouldn't necessarily see the picture exactly

as it should be. Or let's say your television is mounted closer to the ceiling, it might not be ideal either because your viewing angle is not the way that you know was thought of as being ideal. Oh, LED screens typically have a much more consistent viewing experience across multiple angles, So if you do want to mount a television close to your ceiling, then an old screen might be the way to go because it won't be as affected by that that extreme viewing angle as an l

c D television would. One other thing I do need to mention about oh LED screens. This was actually brought up by someone on Twitter, and I apologize. I tried to find your tweet this morning, but I couldn't find it. I don't know what has happened. I don't know why it's disappeared from my mentions. But someone actually pointed out in our last episode that, like plasma displays, oh LED screens can experience burning. Burning happens when a screen holds

a particular image for a really long time. And I'm talking like hours and hours of hour of holding that image. So imagine like you have a video game playing and you pause the game and the system never goes into sleep mode. It just holds that image there, and then you go on vacation for two months and you come back. That's what I'm talking about. So in these cases, that image of whatever was held on the screen for so

long burns into the display. Uh. In this case, it means that the particular oh LED elements have held that image so long that they kind of hold onto a ghost of that image forever. So if you try watching anything, you'll end up seeing sort of a transparent image of

whatever it was that was burned on the screen. Usually what you'll get is actually image retention, not image burning, which is more like the experience of having, you know, a bright light flash in your eyes for a second, and you get that after image, that retinal after image. That can happen with oh led screens, but that's temporary. The retained image will fade and before long you wouldn't

even remember that was on there. But it is possible for those kind of ghostly images to become a permanent fixture. If it's held long enough, it goes beyond being an afterimage and it becomes burning. One way this can happen is if you have a television that's set to a specific channel, and let's say that channel has a logo up on screen pretty much all the time. So you've got a television running, say a twenty four hour news

station like CNN or Fox News or something. The logo in the corner can actually eventually burn into the screen. If you're just showing that all the time and the TV never goes off. Now, for most people, this isn't a problem because most people typically watch a variety of things and that prevents burning from happening. Uh if it's like a TV that's in say an office setting, and it always has CNN on, well, then you're more likely to see burning with a no LED screen under those cases.

I like to think of this as, uh, those oh LAD components that hold onto the image are really just saying this is all I know how to do now, which frankly is a mood that I identify with. And technically l c D based televisions can also have burn into but it is far less common it. It requires, like like I said, ages and ages and ages of holding the same sort of image for it to happen with your typical l c D based televisions. But even with oh LAD, it's something that the average person is

not likely to encounter. So while it is possible, I don't want to discourage people from, say, going to look at oh LED screens because it's not likely to happen to you. All Right, That, I think means we're finally ready to transition away from visuals and talk more about sound. So we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we're gonna pick up with the sound component of home theater systems, which for a lot of home theater enthusiasts, they argue that as the most important component.

That you know, your screen is important, obviously, but that your sound is even more important than that. So if you were to like budget out of home theater, you would want to put more money towards your sound system than your television or your screen and projector. I don't know that I agree with that. I probably do because I do really like sound. I mean, I'm in podcasting after all. But um yeah, we're gonna get into that after this quick break. So we'll be right back now

to talk about sound. We're gonna need to have a quick refresher on what sound actually is because it is important and longtime listeners of tech stuff y'all know all this by heart by now, but we get new folks all the time. So let's talk about the physics of sound, all right. So sound, when you really break it down, is essentially vibration. It's atoms and molecules that are vibrating against each other in a way that extends outward from the point of origin, and it extends outward in all

directions from the point of origin. So as long as there are enough molecules of whatever, this vibration is moving through the medium. In other words, sound can travel. That's why sound doesn't travel in space, because there's a lack of molecules that are close enough to vibrate against each other,

so sound can't travel out there. We talk about the speed of sound a lot, particularly with stuff like air travel or you know, projectiles, but that phrase is deceptive because sounds speed is dependent upon the medium through which it travels, so sound does not travel at the same speed through everything. Sound will travel at a different speed through solids versus liquids, versus gases, and it gets even

more complicated from there. Most of the time we can just say speed of sound to mean how fast sound travels through the air, because that's how we typically experience sound. But even this needs some qualifiers because sound will travel at different speeds through cold air then it will through hot air, and different speeds through dry air than it will through humid air, so we actually do have to

get very specific. That usually means we say sound travels at three per second through dry air at twenty degrees celsius, which is sixty degrees fahrenheit. So why does that temperature matter. Well, if you remember your physics, when you heat gases up, they expand and the molecules get more energy and they move around a lot more. Colder gases are more dense, the molecules move less. In fact, if you can cool down the gas to absolute zero, the lowest temperature you

can get, you stop molecular movement entirely. But typically we are not talking about temperatures that cold. Sound will travel faster through warm air than cold air, and you can think of the molecules as being a little bit more loosey goosey, and so they'll move around more easily, and thus vibration will pass through this more easily. There's less resistance anyway. Now that's super important for our home theater discussion. It's just good to have a basic handle on the

physics of sound before you start talking about sound setups. Now, some things that are super important about how sound behaves is that when it moves through one medium and encounters another, things change. So, for example, let's say you're swimming underwater and someone above water is shouting your name. If you hear that at all, it's going to be pretty muffled, which is weird because you know, sound travels pretty well through liquids. I mean, whales are able to sing to

each other miles apart. Right, Sound can travel enormous distances underwater. But when sound encounters a boundary between two mediums or or media, if you prefer like moving from the air to the water, then typically one of three things happens. Sound waves get absorbed, which means, you know it, they just kind of get absorbed by physical material and they no longer bounce around. Or sound waves get refracted, or sound waves get reflected, and this is super important for

home theater setups. So let's just get refraction out of the way, because most of you don't need to worry about it unless you plan to set up your home theater system inside a glass cube and then watch everything from outside the cube, which you know, don't do that. Between the refraction of sound and the glare that you're gonna get on the glass, it would be a subpar experience.

But with a refraction, waves traveling through one medium will change direction and speed as well as wavelength as they pass through the boundary of the one medium into another, such as from a gas to a liquid, or vice versa um. If you've ever noticed that a straw and a glass of water looks as though it's in one position above the water line and a different position below it, like it's offset, that's because light waves are refracting as they pass from the air to water. So light behaves

in a very similar way. Sound does the same. Anyway, we're gonna leave that behind because refraction is not as important to us as reflection and absorption. If the density of the two mediums is extreme, Like if there's a difference in density where you're going from like gas to a hard solid, you're more likely to see reflection than you are refraction. With a reflection, a wave of traveling through one medium encounters a dense obstacle and then bounces

off that obstacle. It cannot absorb into it, it cannot refract through it, so it bounces off it reflects. So in a home theater, sound traveling from speakers might encounter like a hardwood floor and thus bounce off the floor, and the angle of bounce is interesting. The law of reflection tells us that waves will bounce off an obstacle

at an angle equal to the angle of approach. So, in other words, if sound is coming in at a thirty five degree angle, when it's hitting the ground, it will bounce off at a thirty five degree angle from the ground. If it's forty five degrees coming in, it will be forty five degrees coming out. If it's ninety degrees, it will be ninety degrees. Knowing this is really important because this comes into effect when we start talking about things like soundbars, which we may or may not get

to in this episode. I'll find out when I get there, all right. Because of this fun fact of the law of reflection, people can create really cool effects in spaces, physical spaces. Folks figured this out a long, long long time ago, which is part of the reason why certain buildings, like certain churches and cathedrals in Europe, for example, are built in really similar styles. And part of the desired outcome was to create a structure that would reflect sound well.

Because remember these things were built in the days before amplified sounds, so you didn't have microphones and speakers and stuff, and you had musical composers who would create sacred music knowing about the reflective effects, and they would create some truly remarkable pieces of music that to this day sound incredible if you happen to be inside one of those structures when a group performs it, because it was made for those spaces and those reflections end up creating effects

that enhance the music. If you were to hear it outside of that building, it would sound like a totally different piece and you would lose some of that complexity. But the reason I bring it up here is that if you do have a lot of hard surfaces in your home theater room, like hardwood floors, woodwalls, maybe like a flat hard ceiling, then you're gonna get a lot of sound reflection, and that's not necessarily a good thing.

If you want to create an immersive audio experience, then you want to be able to control how sound is going to reach the audience. So let's say it's you, like you're planning on being the person who primarily uses

this home theater. You want to be able to control how sound gets to you, so that Let's say you're watching a really creepy horror movie and you want the sounds to be really specific and directional, so that when something happens, say off to the left to your left on screen, then you hear it on your left side. Maybe even more positional than that, maybe it sounds like it's coming up from behind your left shoulder. Well, you have to create a setup where all this can happen.

And for that reason, a lot of home theater enthusiasts prefer to have carpeted floors, and they prefer to have walls that either have some form of baffling on them, like foam or fabric panels that absorb sound rather than reflect it, or they will put their home theater in a place that has like drywall, which is pretty good at absorbing sound. It doesn't reflect sound quite as badly as say a flat wood wall would. Same thing is

true for the ceiling. Some homeowners when they're playing in a home theater, they'll use carpet tiles, and they'll cover the ceiling with carpet tiles to try and dampen sound and absorb it so that you're not getting reflections off the wrong speaker. If you're hearing a reflection that's coming from the right speaker in your left ear, then it's sending the wrong information to your brain right, it's telling you, oh, hey, something's happening off to the left, when really it should

be happening to the right. So it's all about control. And I think it talked a bit about windows in our last episode, and not only is it important to have good curtains or shades for windows to help cut down on ambient light and reduce glare, it's also important to cover those windows so that you don't have a flat,

hard surface that sound can bounce off of. Now, I know talking about sound reflection may seem like I'm way off track as far as tech goes, But the reason I wanted to cover it is I would hate for anyone to go out and make a massive investment in a home theater system. I mean, these things can get wicked expensive. I looked at one for the purposes for the purpose is a research for this episode, not to put it in my home because I just can't afford this.

But I looked at one where it said like this one's not terribly expensive, and it was a ten thousand dollar system that was just for the sound system, not not even including like a television or projector or anything like that. Ten grand that's a huge amount of money. I mean unless you're like really rich, in which case, hey, do you want to go to lunch? But it's a

huge amount of money. I would hate for anyone to even start looking at putting towards an investment for a home theater without understanding these elements of sound and how the room that they choose might cause issues on the setup that they want. So these decisions all have to go hand in hand. You have to figure out, you know, what the physical spaces, how you want to change that physical space, if at all, in order to accommodate your system,

and what system would best work within that space. Now, in most cases, you can find ways to address these issues so that they're not too much of a pain in the took is. Uh, they aren't game breakers or anything like that. But again, if you're really looking to create that incredible home theater uh you know experience, you

have to take all this into account. So it it means that you have to know about the potential problems you could run into so that you can figure out solutions to them before you, you know, break the wallet in order to pay for a killer system. All right, So let's talk about sound setups now, way back in the nineteenth century. Don't worry, this will be short, but

this was shortly after the invention of the telephone. There were people like Clement Adair who showed how two receivers or speakers could provide an interesting listening experience, with each speaker playing a slightly different aspect of that that sound. So Adder had set up telephones at the Paris Opera and positioned the telephones around the edge of the stage, and he ran transmission lines to a suite of rooms in a nearby building, so you could visit this exhibit.

Is during an exhibition and Paris. You could sit down and you would hold up a pair of receivers, so you would hold one tier left ear and one tier right ear. And because the receivers were connecting to different telephone transmitters back at the Paris Opera, you would get a slightly different listening experience for each ear. Maybe one of the transmitters would be closer to the left side of stage and the other one closer to the right side of stage, so you would get a kind of

stereophonic experience. Right you would be closer to what it would be like if you were there in the space yourself. Right. Obviously, when we're in a room, sound can be coming at us from all sorts of different directions, from different sources. But if we're watching something and it only has one speaker, then all the sound, all the elements of sound within

a scene are coming from one direction, one source. Well, this was a germ of an idea that would kind of sit unused for a long time because we just didn't have the technology to be able to transmit different sounds two different speakers. Then we got an engineer named Alan Blumline. He created a method to record two separate channels of sound from the same you know, source, and each channel could go to a specific speaker, so you

could have stereo sound this way. Right, you could designate certain sounds to be on the left side versus the right side. Now, this was in the nineteen thirties, and it was in response to the problem that at that time cinemas were reliant upon a single channel of sound.

So even if you had multiple speakers set up in your theater room, each speaker would be putting out the same sound signal, Right, you would get the exact same sound coming out of each speaker's They'll be mono sound, no matter how many speakers you you hooked up, so you would have no sense of directionality when it came to the source of the sound. There'd be no connection between where something was happening up on screen and where it seemed to be happening in the soundscape around you.

So if a woman on the left side of your screen shoots a pistol at someone on the right side, you know you'd hear the gun go off, but it would just come be allowed bang. There'll be no indication of what side that came from. It would just be associated with the visual bloomlines. Inventions allowed for more nuanced soundscapes and bloom lines work would go on to impact multiple industries like the music industry as well as film and television. But we're really interested in television's here, so

we're gonna stick with that now. Stereo sound took a really long time to get to television's, at least to be fully integrated into the TV experience. Back in the nineteen fifties, ABC did kind of an experiment with The Lawrence Welk Show, and the network provided stereo sound decades before anyone could broadcast in stereo. So how did they

do that, well, it was kind of a cheat. See, the television signal carried a monophonic sound channel, so a single channel of sound recorded from this show, as was the style at the time, or rather as was the limitation.

But ABC also happened to own a radio network, and if you had a television and a radio in the same area, and you could tune your TV into The Lawrence Wolke Show and your radio into the radio broadcast version of the Lawrence Wolke Show, you could take advantage of stereo sound because ABC set up microphones in the studio that went to the monophonic feed for television, so they were specific for the TV side, and they had a separate array of microphones set up to go to

a different mono channel, this time to the radio. So two different mono channels that when you hear them combined creates a stereo experience. The mis were in different locations in the sound stage, but by combining both you get this more full, fleshed out audio experience. This was obviously a really clujie way to get stereo sound. Disney did the same thing too, by the way, working with ABC the show Walt Disney Presents produced the Peter Chaikowski Story.

People Disney did this too, by the way, working with ABC the Show Walt Disney Presents produced the Peter Tchaikovsky Story and paired it with simulcasts both on AM and FM radio, so putting all that together would create the

stereo effects while watching the program. While stereo sound became common with recordings like vinyl records and UH on the radio starting in the nineteen sixties and the following decades, and film really got into stereo sound in the nineteen seventies, stereophonic television wouldn't become a thing until the late nineteen seventies in Japan and the mid nineteen eighties in the United States. I'll talk about it more, but first let's

take another quick break. All right, Let's talk about stereo TV and why it took so long to take off. Even after it was becoming a thing with like you know, records and film and stuff, there was really a chicken

in the egg problem going on at the time. Consumers were reluctant to sink a lot of money into television sets that were compatible with stereo, or otherwise buying TV sets that you could connect to a stereo system like a Hi Fi stereo system and have the sound play out on big speakers as opposed through the television itself. This was a big investment and there really wasn't much

content you could enjoy in stereo. So even after the engineers figured out how to broadcast stereos sound out to two listeners to viewers, there wasn't much that was actually done that way. You had television stations that didn't want to invest in the stereo transmission equipment. It's not like they could use the same stuff they were using for

the mono uh equipment, you know, content. So that meant that there wasn't much you could use these four It's kind of like the early days of h D t V. You could buy an HDTV in the early days and you had nothing to watch on it because everything was still broadcasting standard definition. Uh. So that meant that it took some time for both sides to kind of get

adoption rates going. You know, consumers had to feel like this was the way things were going to be, and TV stations and producers had to feel like there was

a demand to supply that kind of content. But eventually stereo television did become commonplace, as did stereo recorded media, and for home theater enthusiasts, this usually meant that you would hook up your television either two speakers directly, or more often, you would feed the audio output from your television into a device called a receiver, which could transmit the channels of audio to specific speakers, giving you the stereo sounds so that you had a left channel and

a right channel. UH these days where well beyond simple stereo, and the audio options can be daunting, particularly since there's a wide range of options that aren't always applicable for every source of media. For example, if you've shelled out the big, big bucks for a Dolby Atmos system complete with all the speakers you would need to make that a reality, and you find out that the media you're watching doesn't support Dolby Atmos, well you're not going to

be able to enjoy the entire immersive effect. There are technologies that try to compensate for that. They're very similar in some ways to upscaling technologies with ultra high definition televisions, where there's an attempt to fill out UH stuff so that you can watch lower quality or in this case, listen to lower quality stuff. But on a high quality system, it's not perfect. It's not like it can magically create surround sound where there was no surround sound before, but

it's better than you know, just just standard stereo. So with that in mind, if you are building out a home theater, it's good to make a list of questions that you need to answer so that you can start going down the right direction. So, are you planning on a home theater that's built around music? You know you're not thinking about a home theater space for TV. You

want a really good music experience. Well, in that case, there might not be much point to building out a surround sound system because the standard format for music is stereo, not surround sound. Are you planning on watching a lot of cable or broadcast television, Well, you might want to look into surround sound, but you should know that a lot of programming still isn't necessarily broadcast in surround sound, so you wouldn't get a ton of benefit out of

that either. In many cases. In this case, it would be a really good idea to see if whatever shows or content you plan on watching, if it actually is already in surround sound when it's being broadcast out. If it's not, there's no point in building out a surround sound system. If you plan to watch a lot of movies or play the latest Triple A video game titles, well, then surround sounds likely to play a big part of that experience. But let's start on the small end, all right.

So stereo means we do have those two channels of sound, right, one channel for the left, one channel for the right. That's pretty simple. Typically you're also talking about a subwhiffer to handle the low frequencies, and we'll talk about subwhiffers more extensive later on. Surround sound requires at least three speakers, but typically you're looking at either five or seven plus the subwiffer. Uh. Then you've also got your receiver or mixer. This is a device that sends the proper channel of

sound to each proper speaker. Right, it controls the mixing level of them all as well. So let's say you want to crank up the base so that the action

film you're watching makes your house shake. You could do that, or maybe you're thinking, you know, I'm not getting as much out of the left side as I thought because of the way this room is so you might want to boost the left side a little bit so that on a technical level you would say the left side is putting out more volume than the right, but on an experience level, you could say, no, it feels this

is what feels right to me. That's what is really important with these receivers and mixers is that they keep the signal nice and clean, that they're not mixing those those signals up, and that you're able to have this very fine control over the quality of those signals, including things like how much of each range of frequencies gets sent out to speakers, like if you want to tweak

things like the trouble for example. Uh So, ultimately, when you really get down to it, this is all about getting the relative right sound levels out of each speaker so that your home theater sounds the way you want it to. That's what it really means. When you strip away all the language, all the jargon, all the knobs, all those different numbers, it's really just about getting the experience right so that it's what you wanted, the thing that you were imagining when you were building out your

home theater. That's really what the only part that really matters, the numbers not so important. It's the experience that matters, and also a caveat surround sound works best for larger home theaters, like larger rooms for home theaters, if you have a relatively small room for your theater setup, it could actually be better to go with a stereo approach or a sound bar, and also probably with a subwhiffer, maybe not a super powerful subwhiffer if it's a small space,

but still a subwiffer. Now you might be tempted to trick out even a small room with all the extra speakers, like I want a seven point one system in there. But when you are working with smaller spaces, you can have a lot of crossover issues with sound, which muddy the whole directionality thing right Like if the sound from the right side is in your ears hard to distinguish from the sounds from the left side, you haven't really accomplished anything. And with smaller spaces that can be a

real issue. And at that point you've already spent a ton of money on a setup that just doesn't create the experience you wanted. So a stereo with a subwiffer or a sound bar in a subwiffer might work. A lot better for those kinds of spaces. Let's break down the s on sound experience a bit further to talk about what all those different channels and speakers are for. So on the most basic level, the whole idea is

very similar to stereo. Each speaker in the surround sound system is carrying a specific channel of sound that relates to the speaker's physical location with your within your home theater and the sounds location within whatever media you're consuming. So that means that when you're building out your home theater system, it's important to position the speakers around your you know, preferred seating area in order to get the

effect you want. This means, by the way, that if you are sitting in a different position than you know, the ideal space, you do get us slightly less than ideal experience because just as the way the sound is directed, Um, it's not like it's gonna be necessarily a world ender like you'll notice immediately, but depending upon the size of the room and the equipment you're using and how you've set it all up, it can be you know, something that you actually notice if you were to sit, say

at the far extreme left side of your home theater versus the center. You might be able to tell the difference. Now. The first big film to use a surround sound approach was Fantasia, a Walt Disney production, and Disney famously required theaters to install incredibly expensive sound systems and equipment in order to play Fantasia as it was intended so that the sound would appear to kind of travel around and

even through the audience. For example, during the piece fly of the Bumblebee, Walt Disney wanted to create an effect that would make it sound as though a bumblebee were really flying through the audience, and that meant Disney had to record multiple channels of sound and then funnel those channels two specific speakers at a specific timing around a theater and carefully tweaking all the channel levels of sound so that this specific sound would appear to travel around

the audience. It was a technical marvel. I mean, it was truly a phenomenal technological achievement. It was also insanely expensive, and Phantasia did not set the box office on fire, so this became a bit of a sore point with some theater owners because they spent a huge amount of money for a system that was specifically designed for a film that was not a hit, So tough call there. In surround sound systems, you typically see numbers like five

point one or seven point one. Sometimes you'll see two point one or five point one point two. Uh. The point one in this case that refers to the subwiffer, and the other number tells you how many channels of sound there are, plus how many speakers are involved with your typical systems. So, uh, with two point one, you've got the simple left channel, you've got the right channel,

you get your subwiffer. You'd want to set the speakers up to the left and the right of the television, you know, left speaker on the left side, right speaker on the right side, angled so that they are pointing toward wherever you're going to be sitting to watch television, presumably in a position that's directly across from the TV. The sub whiffer, however, you can pretty much put anywhere in the room as long as you can, you know, still plug it into the receiver and if necessary, and

external power outlet. A lot of subwhiffers require extra power because they're pushing around a heavier diaphragm inside the speaker. But then we get into the five point one and seven point one. This is where it gets a little more complicated. So what does a five point one system mean, Well, it means the system supports five horizontal channels of audio plus the subwhiffer, and typically you've got a center channel, so this speaker should sit like in line between you

and the television. Often these speakers are mounted below or above the TV. This is where you usually get the majority of stuff like dialogue, unless it's something like a character who's off screen and their dialogue is coming from you know, a specific side, but usually like dialogue and stuff like that gets fed through the center channel primarily. Then you've got your left and right front speakers, which, like a two point one system, you would position to

either side of your television. On the left side and the right side. You would have them angled towards where you plan to sit. But then you also have left and right surround channels, and these speakers you would typically mount to the left and right behind your seating area. So let's say you've got a couch, you would have these mounted behind your couch, but more off to the side than they are behind you right, so more off to your left and to your right than they are

directly behind you. If you were to measure out the angle between your view of the TV and the speakers. So let's say that you know your your line of sight to the television marks the zero degree mark, then the angle would be somewhere around a hundred ten to a hundred twenty degrees. Uh so, so beyond like directly to your left or right a little bit, and um hundreds degrees to d degrees to your left and another to the right. Collectively, the speakers would create the soundscape

that would have you surrounded by glorious noise. But then we get to seven point one, and I'm sure you've already gathered. Seven point one means that you've got seven channels of sound and thus seven speakers plus the sub wiffer. The setup is a little bit different. Here. You still have the center and you have the front left and

front right speakers, just like five point one. Then you've still got the sub wiffer, but the surround channels now split from two channels, which were you know, back left and back right for five point one, and now it's

four channels. So in this setup you would typically have one set speakers essentially directly to your left and directly to your right, so a ninety degree angle between your view of the TV and you know your left and right side, So these are pointing straight at your ears and other words, but you know, not at not like super close. They're off good distance on either side. Um, so those would be those two speakers. Then you would have rear two speakers that would be a little bit

more behind you than the five point one. Remember five point one was at an angle of like a hundred two degrees. These would be more like a hundred thirty five to a hundred fifty degrees from your point of view of the TV, so so more behind you than the five point one version was. Then we've got a variation on this called Dolby atmos. So Dolby atmos repurposes two of the speakers in a seven point one system, Specifically, the two speakers that are positioned behind you, those ones

that are at the one hundred fifty degrees viewing angle. Uh, theyse become height speakers, meaning you're to mount these higher up, maybe even suspend them from the ceiling itself, and these speakers then projects sound overhead of the audience, and that can create some really interesting effects when paired with media that supports Dolby Atmos, the overhead channels can add more specificity to the location of sounds, making the experience way

more immersive. And the whole reason behind this was that the folks that don't be figured that people would be able to hear sound coming from above more effectively than they would hear sound coming from behind them because our ears are not really shaped in such a way that

they're great for catching sound that's coming from behind us. Uh. Sometimes the Dolby Atmos gets the designation of five point one point two, meaning you have five channels of regular horizontal surround sound the center front, left, front, right, and then the left and right channels. Then you have the subwiffer, then you have the two channels of overhead audio. Confused yet, there are actually some other seven point one configurations, but they get really in the weeds, and for most people,

I feel it wouldn't be helpful. I will go into a little bit detail in our next episode to kind of talk about them, but I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on it because it just gets really, really nerdy in the home theater space, and for a lot of people, I think it's overkill, but we will touch on that in our next episode. So in our next episode, we are going to talk a little bit more about sound. We'll talk why we want

a subwoper in the first place, for example. We'll chat a little bit about some of the other things we have to take into consideration with sound, and we'll also look at some of the other components that we would want in a home theater system, like the media sources and stuff, because obviously, having the best equipment in the world isn't gonna do any good if you're not feeding it media that can take advantage of it. So that'll

be our next episode. That's it for this one. If I've left something out or there's something specific you want to know more about when it comes to home theater, reach out to me. I love hearing from you. The best way to do that is on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is

an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, you visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows, h